It is always assumed that life goes on from generation to generation; a
continuous flow along the highway of life. Like Ol’
Man River, it “keeps on rollin’
along.” This applies, of course, to everything
— not just music — but since my own
passion is for this kind of organized sound, I seek out those who
create it and perform it and teach it. Those teachers insure the
uninterrupted flow along the various streams and tributaries, while
augmenting and refining both the concept of the art and its displayed
versions.

In the course of over 1600 interviews, I have managed to chat with many
who have taught. Sometimes their students also wind up in my
stable, and I even have a couple of instances of
teacher-student-grandstudent! So it is not surprising that the
oldest of my guests will descend from earlier generations whose names
are perhaps legendary.

In this particular interview with composer and teacher Robert Starer,
he cites his own connection to a very famous name. A VERY
famous name. One that everyone knows — probably
any audience at all kinds of performances. I will not divulge the
name here, but encourage you to discover it late in this
article. Don’t jump ahead and try to find it.
Just allow it to sneak up on you when you’re not expecting
it.

One last thing, please. Remember that this interview is NOT about
that famous guy. It’s a conversation with a
continuation of that line who is here during our own time, and who is
making his own imprint on the continuation. It is correct that
the emphasis is on the new guy, with only a mere mention of the
legendary one. Usually it’s the other way around, but
today the reverse is true.

Bruce Duffie:
I want to begin by asking you about
teaching. You are a professor of...

Robert Starer:
...composition and theory.

BD: Is
composition something that really
can be taught, or must it be innate with every young composer?

RS: Some
aspects of composition can and need to be
taught. The student has to study counterpoint and orchestration,
but beyond that, it is really the individual. I find there are
generally two kinds of composition students: first, those who
look to the outside and imitate. They’re relatively easy to teach
because they will eventually model themselves after one composer, then
another, and finally a third and go with the fashion of the
times. I have a feeling that eventually they will teach the same
way themselves. Then there are composers who look to the
inside. They are much more difficult to teach, and all one can
really do is help them with their problems — which
are not always musical — and
encourage them, because even criticism has to be encouraging.
Then they may develop, and if they have talent and stamina and are
willing to resist difficulties or overcome them, I think they will
become composers.

BD: Does
either one of these personality types tend
to become a better composer, or a more accepted composer?

RS: Whether
you are accepted or not in your own time,
I think, very often depends more upon your political skill than your
music.

BD: Is that a
good thing, or a bad thing?

RS: [Laughs]
No, it’s not a good thing, but it’s a
real one! And it has always been that. There were people in
Bach’s time infinitely more famous than he. There were people in
Mozart’s time; that has now been publicized a great deal. There
have always been composers. If you pick up a modern music
magazine of the twenties and thirties, you will find long articles
about people whose names this generation has never heard. And I’m
equally convinced some of the names that are big today — I will not
name them for you — will not be known twenty years from now. But
they sit on all the committees; they run the show themselves, so to
speak. They are excellent politicians.

BD: Whose
fault is it that the composers are not
well-known?

RS: This is
not the fault of the composers or of the
music world, but I think it has something to do with our world in
general. As they say, the wheel that squeaks the loudest gets the
grease. It’s much more to do with that and I don’t think it’s
limited to the music world; it’s probably generally true. The
very best people do not always become the leaders of the world,
either. But we are talking about music...

BD: Well,
should we teach young composers who have
great talent how to squeak louder?

RS: Some of
them squeak awfully well all by
themselves! [Both laugh] No, I’m not recommending
that. I’m just answering your question as best as I can.
Stravinsky wrote that Pisendel was much more famous than Bach in his
day, and Stravinsky, in one of the nastiest terms of our time, called
somebody the Pisendel of our day! Stravinsky had a wonderful,
wonderful sharp wit. If you remember that when John Cage came out
with his piece Silence,
Stravinsky said, “I wish all modern music festivals would be in
silence.” That was the most devastating remark ever made on him.

BD:
As far as whether music should be performed,
whose judgment should be accepted or viewed as accurate? Is it
the public’s judgment, the critics’ judgment, or the composer himself?

RS: I think
the normal life of a music composition is
to be recognized sort of slowly. Then if it has merit it will
establish itself because pieces that make a big splash often are
forgotten also rather quickly. Music, I think, needs to have the
quality that one needs to hear it more than once, so that the
experience of repeated hearings becomes a deepening in order to live
and in order to survive. Why is it we can listen to a piece that
is a hundred years old, and that we’ve known all our lives, and still
discover something new in it? And there are other pieces which
sort of tell us everything they have to tell the first time we hear
them, and we have no desire to hear them again?

BD: Then let
me take this one step further,
especially with the over-proliferation of recordings and the repeated
hearings of the standard repertoire in the concert halls. Is
there a chance that we are giving some of these masterpieces too many
times and too many hearings?

RS:
Absolutely! I think there’s altogether much
too much music around us to which nobody listens. I think this is
the greatest danger surrounding music — greater than any other.

BD: How can
we combat this, or readjust it?

RS: I don’t
know if we can. I think it is up to
the individual. An entire generation has grown up which can
study, play cards, make love, cook eggs or do anything while music is
playing, without paying any attention at all to it. There is, of
course, a kind of music that lends itself to that. Have you ever
known anybody not to get off an elevator in order to hear the end of
the piece that was being played?

BD: [Laughs]
No, but I’ve often not gotten out of my
car!

RS: That’s
something else. I have done that
many times, too. More often, I wanted to know who the
performer was if I particularly liked the performance. Driving
and
listening to music, since you brought it up, I think go extremely well
together — if you are not in a traffic jam.
But if you are on a highway, going on a moderate tempo, driving does
not need your mind’s attention. You can give the music your
entire attention the way you should. But I don’t like the late
Beethoven string quartets as dinner music, for instance, when nobody’s
listening to them.

BD: Let me
pursue this just a little bit
further. The idea of hearing music in solitude, in isolation — do
you think this violated the ideas of the composer who wanted it to be
heard in at least a small concert?

RS: The
composers who wrote before recordings, I
guess, had no choice. The only way they could be heard is in
concerts. Now, since recordings exist and are so perfect, we can
choose when and how we hear music. Some of the choices are good
and some are not so good. I would not want to hear the Mahler Second while I shave in the
morning, or something like that. Music that generates intensity I
want to hear when I’m in the right mood for it. If I do go to a
live concert, I know what to expect and I sort of prepare myself for
it, innerly, and then I really give it my entire attention.

BD: Do you
give any different attention if you are
sitting with two thousand other people in a hall, or if you’re sitting
in your living room with perhaps just your wife and family, or even
alone?

RS: I think
it’s different but it can be equally
intense. I think there’s something wonderful about listening to
music with a lot of other people. To speak as a composer again, I
do believe composers are the only people — compared to writers or
painters — who can actually be present when a large group of people
experiences the result of their art. Writers almost never meet
readers when they are actually reading their books. Painters
encounter the audience at openings, usually, but as a composer, you can
sit in the hall and watch two thousand people react to your
music! If it’s not a premiere and you don’t have to get up, you
actually get a chance, sometimes, to hear some awfully nasty comments
about yourself!

BD: [Laughs]
What do you expect of the public that
comes to hear the music of Robert Starer?

RS: Just that
they listen to it and give it the kind
of attention that I think people should give music; that they should
try to hear what I’m doing. I have no theories; I have no text to
propose. Until I wrote this book, which has just come out, I have
really written very little except program notes and those notes are
always short. There is an anecdote about Beethoven, who played a
piece and then somebody said to him, “Now would you tell me what your
piece is all about?” and he sat down and played it again.

BD: So this
is what you would do if people asked you
about your music — encourage
them to hear it again?

RS: If it
were physically possible, yes.

BD: When
you’re writing a piece, do you write with
the audience in mind, or do you just write for the performers or for
yourself, or for whom?

RS: It really
depends. If I have a commission
for a specific performer, of course I have that performer in
mind. When I wrote the Violin
Concerto for Itzhak Perlman, I knew it was for Itzhak
Perlman. He has the most beautiful violin sound I know, and
technically he can play anything you want. When we went over the
piece together, there were only two times that he said, “God, I’ll have
to practice that!” [Both laugh] And the piece is not
exactly easy. So when I write for a specific performer, I do have
that performer in mind, or for a specific orchestra. For
instance, if a community orchestra commissions me to write, I know I
cannot demand enormous technical things. I keep that in
consideration.

BD: But you
don’t write down to the community
orchestra, do you?

RS: Oh, no,
not at all! But I avoid extreme
difficulty.

BD: Now the
violin concerto which you wrote for
Perlman, does that then preclude other performers from trying it?

RS:
[Laughs] No, but I don’t think anybody will
for a while. Although somebody in the last week asked me two
strange questions about the piece. He said, “How come you don’t
have any woodwind solos in your concertos?” The answer that came
to my mind was, “If you were a stage director and you had Hamlet on
stage doing his monologue, you would not have a pretty girl walk at the
other side of the stage.” But then the same person pointed out to
me that I juxtaposed the violin with the brass quite a bit, and that is
true in this concerto. That person suggested that I rescore it
for violin and winds — which
I have done with my Second Piano
Concerto, by the way.

BD: Is this a
typical thing, to revise scores
drastically like this?

RS: No, but
in our country there is a great bit of
wind playing — bands and
symphonic bands — and they
do want literature. So that a piece gets a sort of second lease
on life if you score it for that combination.

BD: Is it the
same piece rescored, or is it really a
new piece?

RS: The piano
part is identical and the orchestra
part is written for winds only.

BD: So these
are two separate versions.

RS: Yeah.

BD: Do you
ever go back and tinker with pieces, and
rework them so that you are more pleased with one version than another?

RS:
Never! Once I’m done with a piece, it’s
gone.

BD: It’s
interesting that you expressed it that way, “It’s
gone,” rather than, “It’s
starting!”RS: [Laughs]
I am done with it! I have written
quite a bit for dance. I don’t anymore, but I did for a number of
years. I wrote several pieces for Martha Graham and for Ana
Sokoloff and Herbert Ronns, and a lot of others. There, as a
composer you have the advantage that you hear your music almost
immediately. You finish the piece and it immediately goes into
rehearsal, whereas other times you finish a piece, and by the time it
gets played several weeks or months elapse, and I am already on another
piece. I’m really always only interested in the one I’m working
on.

BD: Do you
ever work on more than one at a time?

RS: Yes, I
have done that if I had to. And when
you go to hear a piece that you have written a number of years ago,
that’s a very interesting experience, always. I don’t always like
what I hear, but sometimes I do. Just last week I had a concert
at the Little Carnegie Hall where a young couple who played four-hands,
played my Fantasia Concertante.
These people had studied with the people who had studied with the
people for whom I wrote the piece, so in a sense, they were the
grandchildren of the people for whom I had written the piece.
They did it awfully well, and then I thought to myself, “One day
they’ll teach it to somebody else, and they’ll play it, and I won’t be
around anymore.”

BD: Is this
how musical traditions get established
and continued?

RS: I don’t
know. I have pieces that get played
more now than thirty years ago when I wrote them, and that pleases me
enormously.

*
* *
* *

BD: Are you
basically pleased with the performances
you hear of your music?

RS:
Yes. I enjoy performers who add something
of their own to a piece, and most good performers do. I like a
little bit of interpretation.

BD:
How much is a little bit?

RS: No one
knows. If it’s a distortion, I don’t
like it, but it happens very rarely. Most of the people who are
now on musical stages are very good. I’ve had no disagreeable
experiences with performers.

BD: Let me
ask, then, in the abstract. At what
point does the line become a distortion? I very often talk with
performers and I see it from their eyes, but from the eyes of the
composer, where does that line of distortion become distinct?

RS: I’ve gone
through various phases in this, in to
how I annotate my music. For a while I used to put poco ritardando and poco accelerando. I found
that many musicians exaggerate it, and every poco ritardando became an enormous
slowing down and every poco
acceleranado became an enormous speeding up. Then I
decided to put in as little as possible, with the result that
pedestrian musicians played my music absolutely straight! So I
came to the conclusion that you’re really at the mercy of the
performer’s taste. A good performer will find the right tempo,
and another one, no matter how many indications you put into the music,
will somehow misunderstand.

BD: Are
performers better today than they were ten,
fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago?

RS: I think
they are very, very competent these
days. I don’t know if public attitude to performance has changed
very much. What do you think?

BD: I think
the public seems to be getting lulled
into expecting the perfection they experience on the recording.

RS: Oh, that
is true! I taught at Juilliard for
a great many years, and there you get students from all over the
country, or from all over the world, actually. Many people for
the first time heard somebody in a live concert in New York, whom they
had known from recordings, and they said, “But he hit a wrong
note!” I said, “Yes, thank God he hit a wrong note! He’s
human.” That element, of course, recordings have
obliterated. Nobody releases recordings with wrong notes.
Kreisler was the last one to do that, I think, and Schnabel. Do
you know those recordings?

BD: Oh yeah,
the Schnabel Beethoven discs are just
wonderful!

RS: Yeah, but
to them a recording was really just a
record of a concert, so to speak. People don’t do that
today. I do not like recordings that are so clearly thousands of
splicings. I think one sometimes notices the kind of virtuosity
of the recording engineer, rather than the performer, but the audience
accepts it, of course.

BD: You don’t
encourage wrong notes in recordings of
your music, do you?

RS: [Laughs]
No, no, one does not encourage wrong
notes at any time.

BD: I’ve
asked if you’re pleased with
performances. Are you pleased with the recordings that have
appeared of your music?

RS:
Yeah. The one for brass quintet and harp
was commissioned by the Annapolis Brass Quintet, who have played my
music. When they came with that proposition, my first reaction
was, “What a strange idea! Brass quintet and harp?” Brass
quintet to me means masculinity, vigor, and the harp is an essentially
gentle, feminine instrument. I considered it an absolute
challenge to combine these two. I expected the piece to have
three performances, and to my great surprise it’s being played in a lot
of places. Maybe because it is such a strange combination, the
harpists pick it up. There’s almost no literature for this
combination. I think there was one other piece on the program for
that combination; the rest was either harp solo or brass quintet.
Now that sort of challenge I enjoy very much. When you asked me
whom I have in mind, for instance, there I had the performers in mind.

BD: Were you
pleased enough that you will write a
sequel to the piece, another piece for the same combination?

RS: No, of
course not! I will also not write
another violin concerto. At the moment I am writing a cello
concerto for Janos Starker. [See my Interview with Janos
Starker.]

BD: How do
you decide which commissions you will
accept and which commissions you will decline?

RS: I accept
works that interest me and turn down
works that don’t interest me, and I do not like to do things I have
done before. I like to do things that I have not done in a long,
long time. I did accept a Library of Congress commission for a
work for violin and piano for ’88, but I haven’t written for violin and
piano in twenty or thirty years.

BD: So it’s
like coming back to an old friend?

RS: In a
sense, yeah. But I will not write for
brass quintet and harp again. That is one of the dangers in life;
if you do anything reasonably well, people want you to do more of the
same. One has to stop that, otherwise one becomes complacent and
sort of turns it out and repeats oneself. That, I think, is
artistic death! That is to be avoided at all costs.

BD: When
you’re writing a piece of music, how do you
know when you’re finished? How do you know when you’ve done
everything you should do?

RS: There I
must quote you that French sculptor who
said, “We never finish anything; we abandon it at a certain point.”

BD: Then what
criteria do you use to decide when to
abandon it?

RS: It’s very
rarely that you have a feeling about
your own work that it is perfect; after all, it never is. But
there comes a point when you say, “This is it. I can do no
more. I’m really tired of it.” Then you put finis on it. Also when the
work goes to performance there is a deadline beyond which you cannot
go. Or if it’s about to be published, there’s always that moment
when you send it to your publisher. This is the final version,
because once it’s published to change anything is almost impossible.

BD: Well,
there are all kinds of revisions and
revised scores...

RS: Yes, I
guess there are. I’m just not one of
those people.

BD: For that
you are to be commended! [Both
laugh]

RS: One can
only follow one’s own natural
inclination. For me to revise a piece, that is a long
process. I know there are many, many very prominent people who do
it, but I really think that’s an individual difference.

*
* *
* *

BD: You
brought up the word “perfect.”
Should you
strive for perfection in everything that you write?

RS: One
should always strive for perfection, but
always know that it does not exist.

BD: How close
do you come?

RS: To our
ideal of perfection?

BD: Yes.

RS: Well, to
be modest, I would have to say not
very. But we do try. As composers, we do have moments of
total satisfaction, for instance when we sit in a concert hall or hear
the recording of a really superb performance of our music. I
think those are the really rewarding, great moments of one’s
life. One wishes they could go on forever, but of course nothing
does. It’s sometimes the perfection of the performer that gives
us the greatest pleasure, the sense of being deeply understood.

BD: Suppose
one of those near-perfection concerts was
recorded. Do you get the same feeling if you listen to that tape
six days or six months or six years later?

RS: If it is
really superb, yes. I think it
lasts absolutely.

BD: So then
it transcends the moment in time when it
was given?

RS:
Yes. But for some of those recordings, one
does have to be in the mood. If you would make me listen to one
of those things in the early morning just after I’ve woken up, I might
not be at all in the mood to enjoy or even to perceive it.

BD: Even
though it was the perfection that you sought?

RS: Yeah.

BD: Is there
any chance that when you’re listening to
something that you don’t feel is a very good concert, it’s perhaps your
mood instead of the performance?

RS: There’s
always that possibility, yes. Don’t
you think so?

BD: Of
course! Looking at it from the eyes of
the creator is what I’m inquiring about now.

RS: Yes, I
understand.BD: Is
composing fun?

RS: Of
course! Why else would one do it?
I have just written a book which is called Continuo: A Life in Music, and in
it I’ve explained how I became a composer. I began very early; I
played, and as a child I enjoyed improvising, which was forbidden in my
parents’ home. Luckily my mother couldn’t tell the
difference. So if I had to practice for an hour, I occasionally
put a book onto the piano, read the book, and improvised. As long
as I made sound, she was content that I was practicing. It wasn’t
‘til my late teens that I encountered a teacher who told me that this
was not a nasty, forbidden sort of activity, but that it was something
good and that it should be encouraged, and that it could lead to
composition. The other thing is I have not had a very good
memory. I once had a terrible memory slip in a Scriabin piece,
the Second Sonata in G sharp minor.
For some reason, after playing the development I could not get into the
recapitulation; I always came back to the beginning and the
exposition. After I had done that three times, I was so desperate
that I completely improvised an ending in the style of Scriabin just to
finish that piece. So while I was only in my late teens, I
decided that evening that I could trust my ability to improvise, but
not my ability to remember. That’s had a decisive influence on
the rest of my life.

BD: Have you
done some performing of your own music?

RS: Yeah, but
only to accompany when I have music
before me — never from memory.

BD: Do you
feel that you are the ideal interpreter of
your music?

RS: Oh, no,
by no means! For instance, I do not
conduct. The only playing I do is songs or solo pieces. I
will accompany if I’m asked to, or I will sometimes play easy piano
pieces as parts of a lecture. But I’m not a performer, no.

BD: You don’t
feel that composing is performing for
others?

RS: No, and I
do not enjoy what is called practicing
other people’s music. So I would never have become a good
performer.

*
* *
* *

BD: What are
the special joys of writing for the
human voice?

RS: The human
voice, to me, is the ultimate
instrument. I have tried to write for it all of my life. I
think it’s the most difficult thing to write for, and I hope I am
getting better at it. The human voice is humanity and it is life;
machines are machines and to me they represent death. Therefore I
do like the human voice, and I also like to do things that have human
situations. I’ve always enjoyed dramatic texts, or writing for
the theater. I did dabble at electronic music when it came out,
but not for very long.

BD: Do you
ever add electronics into other pieces,
just to add a color to your palette?

RS: No, but I
can make some of the electronic sounds
with an orchestra! My students always are impressed by
that. It’s not all that difficult. They say, “Oh, that
sounds almost like electronic music!” It’s fun to get some of
those effects by non-electronic means. Next to the voice, I think
I like the violin and the cello best, and then winds and brass.
To write for machines holds no interest for me. But I did dabble
in it when electronic music first came out, and I have used electronic
effects in ballets and some such things, but really only as a sound
effect.

BD: I want to
be sure and ask you about your
operas. First was The Intruder?

RS: That was
a very youthful effort, yeah. I
don’t usually mention that one anymore.

BD: Do you
wish to disown it?

RS: I haven’t
looked at it in years and I don’t think
it was a successful piece at all, no. I know it had some good
reviews, but I don’t think it works, either as theater or as music.

BD:
Why? What about it doesn’t work?

RS: I think
the dramatic story is not convincing.

BD: That’s a
general lament of half the operas in the
literature!

RS: Is
it? [Both laugh]

BD: Next is Pantagleize.

RS:
Yeah, now that I do like. It’s after a
Belgian writer, Michel de Ghelderode, and he sort of touched the
theater of the absurd, but not quite. It is a little
expressionistic, and I adapted the libretto from the play myself, which
meant largely cutting and changing. There were not enough women
in it, so I turned one man into a woman. His widow was still
alive, so I could get permission to do all those things. It had
one very good production, and others have nibbled at it. Although
Andrew Porter of the New Yorker
devoted an entire issue to it with praise and included it in his book,
it has not had more productions. [See my Interview with Andrew
Porter.] I wrote a chamber opera called The Last Lover with Gail Godwin
[with Starer in photo at right],
with whom I have collaborated several times since. That had its
premier at the Caramoor Festival and has had many performances since.

BD: Because
it’s a chamber work?

RS: I think
so, perhaps. The demands are not so
big. It’s just a few singers and a few instruments. It can
be staged without huge expense. It’s also been done in churches
because it’s a sort of sacra
representazione. It has a sacred idea — it’s about
Pelagia, a saint of the fourth century, but the treatment is very
modern.

BD: About how
long does it run?

RS: It’s
forty minutes.

BD: So it
would be good, then, standing on its own in
a church performance.

RS: It’s had
church performances, and it has also had
staged performances, and semi-concert performances. It seems to
last. I think I’m more hopeful about its survival than Pantagleize, which is a big, big
production, which would require a major opera house to take it up.

BD: If The Last
Lover were being done on stage, it would need something else to
fill out the evening’s bill. What kind of things should be done
with it?

RS: It has
often been paired. The last time I
saw it, in Washington, it was paired with Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat, which worked
very well. It is sometimes paired with comic operas. If I
ever have the time, I want to write a funny companion piece for the
same cast.

BD: That
would be very good!

RS:
Yeah. But I’ve never had the time to do it,
or the occasion. I’m just now negotiating for an opera for
’89-’90. It’s not yet negotiated, so I cannot speak about
it. That will be a full-length work. I did one for the
Minneapolis Opera, which is a nice group, by the way.

BD: They seem
to be very adventurous.

RS: Very
adventurous, yeah. I had a very good
time with them.

BD: Is this Apollonia?

RS: Apollonia,
yeah.

BD: Was that
very successful?

RS: I was not
entirely satisfied with it, and if
there is another production — again, it’s been talked about — I would
make a few changes in it.

BD: Since you
are encouraged enough with your own
operas to be negotiating for yet another, you must feel that opera is
still a viable art form.

RS: Well, I
know it’s a step-child
of our century, in many, many ways. If you look at the
literature, there’s really only one successful twentieth century opera,
Wozzeck, right?

BD: I would
list Peter
Grimes in there, also.

RS: Oh, yeah
— and Benjamin Britten. I do think
Benjamin Britten has succeeded, and some of Henze, but only
moderately so. Perhaps Menotti if you like him or if you
don’t. [See my Interviews
with Menotti.]
I have always admired his sense of theater enormously, and I have
envied him the ability to plot and write text and music at the same
time. That is an ability I do not have. But not all his
music is the greatest, unfortunately.

BD: When you
go to a concert or an opera, does the
public have the right to expect that the music they’re going to hear
that night is the greatest?

RS: The
operas that have survived
— Mozart, Verdi, and so forth
— are, in a way. There are a few dreary
spots here and there, but there’s always something beautiful coming
just around the next corner.

BD: When
you’re writing an opera, do you strive to
make sure that there’s always something beautiful coming around the
next corner?

RS: [Laughs]
You like to pick me up quickly, don’t
you? Yes, I do think there has to be ups and downs. I do
think the idea of having spoken dialogue is basically a sound one,
although many purists immediately say this is not an opera. But
it works for Mozart and better than the recitative, which I find very
boring, particularly in a foreign language when I go to the
opera. Even in Wagner, where there is no recitative, there are
long, long dreary stretches between the glorious moments!

BD: Do you
feel, then, that opera should be given in
translation?

RS: Oh,
yes! I do. I know you lose
something if you do, but it’s wonderful if you do understand what is
being said. Of course it also presupposes a composer who sets it
in such a way that you can understand.

BD: [Laughs]
So that if your operas are being done in
a European country, you would encourage them to do it in the
translation?

RS:
Yes. In The
Last Lover I have spoken dialogue. I’ve just done two
works for narrator for the first time in my life! At first I was
sort of resistant both to the concept of it and then to the practical
side. However, I found that it works extremely well, and for once
I will be absolutely certain that the audience will know what is being
said. They will not have to read program notes or watch
interpretations on a screen or anything.

BD: Should we
develop a kind of virtuoso narrator,
the way we have a virtuoso violinist or a virtuoso singer or a virtuoso
conductor?

RS: The
second piece I have just done requires a
virtuoso narrator. He happens to be a radio music announcer, by
the way, who is well-known in the New England area, a man named Robert
J. Lurtsema, who can do many voices. The work was commissioned by
the Hartford Chamber Music Society for him and it is called Remembering Felix. Felix is a
pianist — whom we created — who has just died, and there a number of
people who remember him. The first one to remember him is an
oboist who just happens to pick up the newspaper and sees the
obituary. Then we have his former publisher who says, “He would
have had a longer obit if he had remained my customer.” Then we
get his accountant, who is quite entertaining; then a woman who loved
him; two critics, one who liked him and one who didn’t, and finally
three students — one
Japanese, another French and the other one from Zanesville, Ohio, who
took a class with him when he had his heart attack and died. So
the narrator will have to do all these people. In other words, he
would have to be a person who can really modulate his voice and become
different people, which in a sense is a virtuoso narrator.

BD: Is this
at all different from a very skilled
actor?

RS: No, it’s
not. It requires, in other words,
a very skilled actor, but I’ll take your definition. The other
work I wrote requires an ordinary narrator. I live in Woodstock,
New York, when I’m not in the city, and a local organization has asked
me to do something about the area. So I’m using texts from
Washington Irving to Walt Whitman who have described this area.
There the narrator has simply text that almost anybody can read, which
is what they really wanted because they will have a narrator who does
not know music. I looked at the literature for narrator, and
there’s, Copland’s Lincoln Portrait,
and I think the most famous work is probably Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. I
discovered, which I didn’t know, that Prokofiev wrote his own text for Peter and the Wolf. He
combines things — segments where
just the narrator speaks, and then there is music. But it was
intended as a piece for children, so maybe one needs children for a
narrator. Anyway, to come back to the question, I have enjoyed
writing for narrator, although at first I didn’t think I would.

*
* *
* *

BD: You
brought up the subject of children. How
can we get more children to come to concerts of serious music?

RS: I think
people do a lot of that. I have
written a lot of music for children, and I’ve always enjoyed doing
them. I’ve written piano pieces such as Sketches in Color, which are played
by many children. And I have a choral work for children, so there
are a number of things. You cannot fool children; they see
through pretense very quickly if you can interest them. I do
think children should make music, rather than listen to it.

BD: Music as
a participatory art?

RS:
Absolutely, especially for children. I
think what goes on in our schools is wonderful, where they give them
instruments and teach them to play or at least sing in a chorus.
I do think children should make music, rather than only listen to
it. Even if they later don’t make music, they will have an
understanding of it and how it is made. Not that I have been to
many, but we do have lots of very good children’s concerts. I
once had a commission for a piece for children, for a youth
concert. This was a long time ago and I wrote a piece called Six Variations with Twelve Notes.
Not that I am strictly a twelve-tone composer, but at that time I was a
little bit, and I wanted to make the whole idea of twelve-tone music
accessible to children. It had a great many performances at the
time. In Detroit, the conductor Paul Freeman took it all through
his children’s concerts. Others did, too, and it still gets
played every now and then.

BD: I assume,
though, you are not aware of all the
performances of your music that go on.

RS: Oh,
no. How can one be?

BD: Does it
surprise you when you get a letter or a
review, or something from someplace that they’ve done this or that?

RS: Oh
yeah! There are lots of
them in the mail and sometimes tapes arrive. It’s very
nice! And as one gets a little older, it’s also interesting to
find which works stay and which works sort of die or disappear.
If there is a logic to it, I have yet to really find it. Many
pieces which I like of my own have not survived, and others which I
sort of wrote quickly seem to live on. Perhaps they are better
and
they just came too easily to me.

BD: You say
that some pieces die. I would
think that none of your pieces would die, that once they are published
there’s always a possibility of life for them.

RS: There is,
but the publishing
industry is in somewhat of a trouble these days, and if a work
does not sell a certain number of copies, they may not reprint
it. Works go out of print. Virgil Thomson, who I saw the
other day and who is amazing at his age of ninety, speaks about how
some of his music has gone
out of print, and he’s a little upset about it.

BD: Because
that means it’s really unavailable?

RS: Well, if
people really want it, they’ll go to a
library and Xerox it, but it’s unavailable to the wide
public. [Wistfully] We should all live to such a ripe old
age. It’s amazing — he came to a concert
of his music, at
ninety! It was not only his music; there was a piece of mine,
too. In fact, mine followed his. He’s a little hard of
hearing, so when his piece was over, he said to the lady
who brought him, “I suppose we have to stay a little while longer?”
[Both laugh] The entire hall heard him and was, of course,
amused. But one
forgives a ninety year old composer almost anything.

BD: Oh, of
course. I had a wonderful interview
with him a couple of years ago, and I used parts of it on the air to
celebrate that ninetieth birthday milestone. [See my Interview with
Virgil Thomson.] RS: He’s one
of the most entertaining, witty people
I’ve ever met.

BD: Is it
wrong to celebrate big round birthdays of
composers?

RS: No, I
think it’s wonderful. It’s also
amazing, the longevity of composers! If you look around, they all
seem to go on
for a long, long time and stay active. These days people live
longer and stay active longer.

*
* *
* *

BD: In
looking over some of the material you sent, I
came across a name I wanted to ask you about — Hermann
Jadlowker [Latvian tenor (1877-1953)].

RS:
When I was very, very young, the first job
I ever had — job in the sense that I was paid; I was seventeen — was to
accompany Herman Jadlowker, who had decided to give recitals
again. That not only became a chapter in my
book, but it appeared in the New
Yorker magazine and in the
London Times. Everybody
seemed rather taken with the story of
this young person who played for Jadlowker, because Jadlowker had sung
for Brahms when he was very young. In fact, it gave me the title
for my book, Continuo, the
continuity. That
I should play
with a man who had actually sung for Brahms was
very, very attractive to me.
He had not much voice left at the
time, but he was an incredibly great performer. He really had the
audiences in the palm of his hand, as they say. He could do
anything he wanted with them! I was so overwhelmed that I
actually forgot to play while we were on stage together.

BD:
[Laughs] My goodness.

RS: And he
was a nice man, an elegant man.

BD: When you
were studying composition, who were your
principal teachers?

RS: I studied
in many places and with many
people, so that I’m really not indebted to one particular individual.

BD: Are you
indebted to one particular style?

RS: No.
I’ve also lived in different places and I
don’t think I am indebted to one particular style. Sounds cannot
be
copyrighted, so if I hear a nice sound that I like, or an orchestration
effect, I have no
hesitation in stealing it and incorporating it into my music! But
I have
never really imitated or emulated anybody in particular.

BD: When you
steal a sound, though, you’re not
stealing something verbatim. It’s being filtered through
your creative mind.

RS: Yeah, but
these things are
public property. Just to give you an example, some years
ago a composer found that if you take a cymbal and play it with a
string bow, it makes a wonderful sound. That sort of thing you
cannot copyright. The moment one person invents that, then
everybody begins to do
that, and there’s nothing wrong with that. George
Crumb hs been extremely inventive in things like that. [See
my Interview with
George Crumb.]BD: Do you
ever use strange instruments or
mis-tunings, or anything like this?

RS: Oh,
yeah! If a dramatic situation requires
it, absolutely, but only as an effect. I don’t think a man
can listen to it for any length of time unless there is a dramatic
justification for it.

BD: What do
you feel is the ultimate purpose of music?

RS: You mean
in our lives?

BD: Either in
our lives, or in the history of mankind?

RS: Well, in
the history of mankind, its purposes
were either the glory of God, or dance, or war. If you substitute
more modern terms for those, I
don’t think it has changed that much. Rock music, I think, is
like war music. This poor generation who hasn’t had a war
has to get rid of its excess energy! And religious music to deal
with the supernatural
is also very much with us today. I would say those fields are the
basic function of it. You’re a very deep questioner!

BD: I like to
probe the mind of
the creator!

RS: You
really do probe the mind. My
compliments.

BD: Thank
you. Thank you very much. You
don’t feel that we should stage a war, though, just so that this
generation can experience it?

RS: [Laughs]
No, no, no. The substitutes are
better. We have sports, which the Europeans take even more
seriously than
Americans! When the Italians play soccer against the
English, it is a little war, as you know.

BD: Should
the concert promoters try to get the
soccer public into the concert hall?

RS: No!
No, I think music was always for a
small part of the population, just as good books are only for a small
part of the population. You can increase that by a
percentage point or two, but I do not think you can ever please
everybody with it.

BD: You don’t
write as an elitist, do you?

RS: I don’t
like the word elitist, but I realize that
if my music were played in the middle of a rock concert,
it couldn’t possibly be received well.

BD: Would you
object to that, though?

RS: I
wouldn’t object. It’s not going
to happen. An audience that wants to hear only a basic beat
repeated and then somebody scream out a few notes again and again and
again, cannot want to listen to anything more elaborate. I
guess that makes me an elitist, but I think it’s impossible not to
be. Most of our population can
read and write, but what they read and write isn’t any better than what
was done a hundred years ago.

BD: You say
you don’t mind stealing something musical that you like. If a
rock performer found something in
your music that he liked, would you encourage him to use it?

RS: I have no
objection. I have taken from rock music, too! Some
of the rhythms are very good! There is some
very good rhythm in rock music. They are, in a sense, more
flexible than jazz was. I
am not really fond of the electronic sounds, but I have used
them for specific dramatic purposes. In the opera Apollonia, we have a character who
has
the ability to transform others, and I used an electronic organ for
that throughout the opera, whenever she does that. A string
section could not have given me that effect.

BD: Is that a
leading motive, then?

RS: Yes, in a
sense like a leading motive. I get letters from jazz
musicians.
You’d be surprised, but they do like what I do and I’m
very flattered when they do. I also wrote a book called Rhythmic
Training, which is used in many of the better schools in the
country. I often get letters from jazz musicians who want to
take private lessons. I had to unlist my phone when the book came
out.

RS: Oh,
there’s only this much you can do in your
life! I thought my doing the book would suffice. Let them
work for
it.

BD:
Thank you so much for spending the time with me this afternoon. I
wish you lots of continued success.

RS: Thank
you. I’ve enjoyed talking to
you very much.

Robert Starer

The Independent, Thursday, 31 May 2001

Robert Starer, composer and teacher:
born Vienna 8 January 1924; died Kingston, New York 22 April 2001.

There
can't have been many RAF pilots in the Second World War who came to the
task from pre-war Vienna via Jerusalem, and fewer still who went on to
become leading composers. But that dislocated background may have
helped give Robert Starer the clear-sighted anti-sentimentality that
makes his music so effective.

Starer was 13 when he entered the
State Academy of Music in his native Vienna. A year later, from his
bedroom window, he watched Hitler's troops march into the city; his
Jewish family fled to Jerusalem. There he enrolled as a student at the
Conservatory, where his teachers included Odon Partos and Josef Tal. It
was between 1943 and 1946, with Palestine under the British mandate,
that he served in the RAF. His move to the United States in 1947 was
initially intended to further his musical education, but it proved
permanent and he took US citizenship 10 years later.

As a student
at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, from 1947 to 1949, he
studied composition with Frederick Jacobi, and in 1948 took a summer
course with Aaron Copland at the Tanglewood Institute. He joined the
Juilliard teaching staff himself in 1949, remaining there until 1974,
and developing a distinguished pedagogical career in a number of other
institutions: the New York College of Music (1959-60), Jewish
Theological Seminary (1962-63), and Brooklyn College (City University,
New York), where he became associate professor in 1963 and a full
professor in 1966, and was elected Distinguished Professor in 1986; he
retired from teaching in 1991.

For all his importance as a
teacher, it is as a composer ­ and a prolific one ­ that Starer
will be
remembered. His musical style was, in the main, traditional: he
preferred to write in a liberated tonality, although with the
contemporary developments of his childhood Vienna audible throughout
his later music, and Hindemith's tough, no-nonsense muscularity
somewhere in the background.

Occasionally, too, he dipped his
toes in serialism, aleatory and electronics, though a more permanent
influence came from the oriental melismata he had got to know in the
Middle East: he had studied Arabic rhythms and scales, and they
reinforced the chromaticism he had ingested in his youth. It becomes
explicit in works like the clarinet concerto Kli Zemer (which
means "instrument of song" in Hebrew). Like almost all fecund
composers, his output is uneven, and his music can occasionally be
rather dry; at best, it has a hard-edged and refreshing honesty.

He wrote four operas, two of them, the chamber opera The
Last Lover (1975) and Apollonia (1979), to
librettos by the novelist Gail Godwin, who was his long-standing
companion; in Pantagleize
(1967) he set his own text. He collaborated with Godwin on a number of
other vocal works, and with the choreographer Martha Graham on three of
his seven ballets: Samson Agonistes (1961), Phaedra
(1962) and The Lady of the House of Sleep (1978).

He
also worked frequently with a number of outstanding instrumentalists:
Itzhak Perlman premiered the Violin
Concerto in 1981, and Janos Starker
his Cello Concerto in 1988.
There are three symphonies, many other
concertante pieces, screeds of chamber music, three piano sonatas and a
generous quantity of vocal and choral music, some of it on a large
scale.

He also took to prose, writing the textbook Rhythmic
Training (1969), which is in widespread use, an autobiography, Continuo:
a life in music (1987), and a work of fiction, The Music
Teacher (1997).

This interview was recorded on the telephone on March 21,
1987. Portions were used (along with
recordings) on WNIB later that year, and again in 1989, 1994
and 1999. A copy of the audio tape was given to the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University. The
transcription was made and posted on this website in 2009.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been
transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award-winning
broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago
from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of
2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and
journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM,
as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.

You are invited to visit his website
for more information about his work, including selected transcripts of
other interviews, plus a full list of his guests. He would also
like
to call your attention to the photos and information about his
grandfather, who was a pioneer in the automotive field more than a
century ago. You may also send him E-Mail
with comments, questions and suggestions.